In a distributed computer environment, client computer systems and server computer systems can share data and executable program code, including applications, services, and resources. In order to facilitate the sharing of these various elements, attribute-based programming allows a developer to specify the services and resources required by an application by setting properties (or “attributes”) of each application or component rather than implementing or calling those services directly from the implementation code. Attributes include a particular set of configuration information that is made available to various callers in an attribute-based programming environment.
Configuration information may be stored on the various machines in the distributed network and relates to specific properties of applications, components, services, and other resources available to that machine. In existing approaches, a system “registry” has been used to store configuration information for a particular machine. However, in existing approaches, a programmer is required to access and manipulate registry information directly, introducing undesirable program complexity and exposing the registry to corruption by improper programming. Moreover, the distribution of configuration information among multiple datastores (i.e., in addition to the registry) and data formats is not accommodated by existing approaches, particularly if the location and format of data is expected to evolve over time. In current approaches, the implementation code itself must be altered in order to handle location and format changes to configuration information. Accordingly, existing approaches lack location and format independence that can provide the desired flexibility for storage and access to configuration information in a computer system.